Philosophy has never been and never will be a science. Nevertheless it is a body of knowledge, a field of autonomous being and the subject’s ontic foundation as knowledge of itself. This paper provides an analysis of the nature of philosophy as an autonomous form of Western spirit during its historical development. The dialectic between reason, knowledge and freedom is studied through multiple historical examples from the Antiquity to modern times.

This paper traces back on a personal tone a provocative evocation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The author considers existentialism as a laboratory of existence that influenced a generation's manner of living and writing and made one's existential desires into historical and political acts. Its most representative mode of expression, literature, was as an indicator of the presence of the private throughout the public world and time. In this view, de Beauvoir's presence is approached both from the perspective of her understanding of the female, and from the particular kind of couple she formed with Sartre.;

Sartre's thought and practice cannot be separated from the experience of the Second World War. Emerging from the war, Sartre formed the idea that the human comes forth out of the subhuman. This paper analyses aspects of Sartre's humanism from the point of view of his political commitment, and presents Sartre's work as an antidote to contemporary economic and scientific determinism. Sartre credit was always given to the growth of freedom in action out of the most unexpected subjectivization. He firmly supported the founding idea of democracy – the power of everyman – and projected the intellectual's mission into each of us once we try to rethink critically our actions in the light of human purposes.

The author recalls his encounters with Jean-Paul Sartre in Cuba and Moscow, during the 1960s. Sarte?s views on Castro, the Cuban and Russian revolutions, as well as Sartre's behaviours in the different countries he visited, are lively evoked in this short first-hand portrait.

This paper discusses the positions of Italian philosopher Giulio Preti (1911-1972) in relation to the quarrel between Analytic and Continental philosophy. Preti?s thought appears as a systematic thought permitting to overcome, through his logical, epistemological and linguistic reflection, the divide between these two approaches. The different features of his philosophy are analyzed here in detail and compared to the main theoretical assumptions of Analytic and Continental philosophy.

The author summarizes here the main theme of the papers gathered in the second part of this issue. It describes the dual identities they deal with (linguistic identities,métissages, masked exiles and social intermingling) and places them in the context of an ongoing seminar work carried out at the Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris.

This is an exclusive interview with the film-maker Nurith Aviv. Her last film Misafa Lesafa, on the plural linguistic identity in Israel, is linked to her former work and analysed through its cultural background, its symbolic dimension and its technical realization.

This paper traces back the psychological effects of the ‘masked exile’ of a Jewish Tunisian family settled in France. The author provides a rich analysis of a sudden and permanent change of nationality, country, language, urban bustle and family environment, following the ‘tunisification of Tunisia’ launched by President Bourguiba at the end of the 1950s. A comparison with the situation of later migrant workers from the Maghreb countries is sketched in the second part of this paper.

This paper describes the cultural circumstances of the ‘crisis of the working-class suburbs’ that shattered France at the end of 2005. The self-representation of the young suburban bands, their need for social differentiation, the legitimacy of their own social existence are presented as factors of the unprecedented social rebellion known by France.

This chronicle is a review of a collective publication commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of W. V. O. Quine’s most influential paper. The author, a prominent epistemologist, discusses these contributions in a way that sheds a particular light on the importance of Quine’s work for the ongoing epistemological debate.